![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() I think Brendan Keogh may be writing a thesis on it, for Christ’s sake! As much as Spec Ops may have passed by the general public’s notice, critics have at the very least been interested. For a while there it got a little unavoidable as ‘Spoiler Warning!’-ridden reviews cropped up all over the place, followed by bemused critics and bloggers on their Twitter feeds wondering what the hell just happened to them. I’ve read a lot about Spec Ops: The Line you may also have done so. Like the good little aspiring games writer that I am, I spend plenty of my time reading about our mutual interest. Underneath, it’s something else entirely. On the surface, The Line looks like a standard military-themed third person shooter. I‘m not sure Spec Ops: The Line wants to be played. (How’s the weather where you are?) Goodness knows that I wouldn’t usually sit down and write a couple of thousand words for OntGeek on a game I haven’t played! But something else is going on here, something unique. If I haven’t played something I’ll say so, and then we’d probably abandon that particular discussion and move on to something more mutually enabling. Is it fair, then, for me to comment further on Spec Ops? I wouldn’t do so about any other game. And then in a shop the other day I picked up Uncharted 3 instead. The game went into my Buy It If There’s Nothing Else Around file. The demo concludes, (as they all do these days) with a trailerish, ‘Here’s what you could get if you buy me!’ montage, but this one actually piqued my curiosity. Not in the gameplay, but in the background chats, in the cutscenes, in the atmosphere. Something about the game seemed to have a little more intensity than normal. Don’t get me wrong, if this demo had Syphon Filter in the title and had come out 10 years ago, this paragraph would have a whole different outlook. I bet if I shoot him at just the right moment he’ll fire at the floor taking down a few of his mates… check. Oh look, that gentleman over there has an RPG. Regular cannon-fodder enemies mixed in with the odd shotgun-wielding brutes? Check. But here I am zip-lining, cover-shooting, grenade-lobbing my way across it. Granted, it has some original backdrops, the sand-wrecked Dubai is a gorgeous environment. This felt like a game I’d played a thousand times before. It wasn’t a total let down, you understand. I’m not sure what Ben said on his first play. What we got in that demo, Ben and I, was an on-rails helicopter chase scene in which we, of course, manned the minigun. If not exactly excited, I was certainly intrigued. Ben’s an experienced writer, and when he’s excited about a game, that enthusiasm permeates right through his words and into me. I particularly remember a piece by Ben Kuchera on Penny Arcade Review and the big deal made of the sandy surrounds, especially the opportunities for context-specific warfare using the ruinous environment. I’d read a few bits on the game beforehand and was interested to see what would present itself. I had a pop at the demo when it came out on PSN and was relatively unoffended. The game’s driving force appears to be the capture and manipulation of expectations, closely followed by the shoving of said expectations where the sun shineth not. Shit, as it were, begins to get real, with descents into madness, player-driven war crimes, American on American warfare, torture, violence, aggression, horror and an uncanny of-this-world-but-out-of-this-world setting. Many reactions to the game have spelt out similar themes: derivative but passable gameplay, linearity masquerading as choice, stock characters and… holy crap, what happened there? Suddenly this paint-by-numbers shooter gets interesting as it begins taking its cues from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Francis Ford Coppola’s infamous film adaptation Apocalypse Now. ![]() Yager Development’s Spec Ops: The Line has managed to become something of a critical darling since being released in June, despite rather lacklustre sales. ![]()
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